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8 Comments

Keith Page
on December 7, 2017 at 9:05 pm

Listening to your episode today, some good tips. I’m a bit surprised you didn’t recommend things like Credit Karam. These guys let you get your credit report weekly. I know for myself the frequent updates were the missing link to form and maintain iterative habits that improved my credit to the point I could get a card for my business; an obstacle I had in front of me for 2 years now.

Much of our financial system is poorly designed as in the pleasure is placed at the front of the transaction and the pain is forestalled.

When you hit your thumb with a hammer you feel the pain of your error. If your body instead forstalled that pain by the time and you received the message you were hitting your thumb it would be a bloody pulp.

Comment? When I moved out of my apartment once the lease was over they said we did over $1000 in damages and kept our security deposit. I tried talking to landlord within a week and they put me in collections. I do not believe we made that much in damage and worked to try to settle and debt collector did not answer.

I’ve left it in collections and have a credit score of around 800, I feel that if this eventually goes to a lawsuit the judge would not agree to amount of damages

So google “tenants rights in [your state] security deposit” and I bet you’ll find something similar. I just did it for my state and found this:

“Florida in a nutshell – Upon the vacating of the premises for termination of the lease, if the landlord does not intend to impose a claim on the security deposit, the landlord shall have 15 days to return the security deposit together with interest if otherwise required, or the landlord shall have 30 days to give the tenant written notice by certified mail to the tenant’s last known mailing address of his or her intention to impose a claim on the deposit and the reason for imposing the claim.”

I think bad landlords use intimidation and count on ignorance of the law, but it looks like if tenants find out what the law is, it should be fairly easy to inform them that you know your rights and intend to stand on them. 🙂

Thanks for writing that. We can easily pay the extra but feel that severely increased the repair bill beyond what’s reasonable. I think eventually this will go to court and I’d fight it for the principal. My credit is in the 800’s and don’t owe anything besides a house so it’s not really hurting us.

Lance, the person I know just got a letter from the landlord saying not only would he not return the $1300 deposit, but the tenant owed him $200 beyond that! He itemized three items: a ceiling fan, a broken shelf (the cheap wire ones in closets), and missing storm shutters. He estimated costs to bring all that to $1500, which is utterly ridiculous. Not to go into detail, but the ceiling fan worked when they left, the broken shelf might cost $50 at most for parts & labor, and the storm shutters go with the building, not with each apartment.

Anyway, the tenant is planning to contact a lawyer who offers a free phone consultation, and the landlord will pay court fees if the lawyer takes the case and wins. It seems unlikely he wouldn’t win, as the landlord has omitted to follow or violated several obvious laws. The tenant has first sent a letter to the landlord, itemizing each issue and stating his intent to use a lawyer to handle the case. Hopefully that letter alone, with the timeline of each wrong thing that was done, will do the trick.

If your so-called damages are just “normal wear and tear,” it should be easy to reference information like this:

I know very little about it (am just using this opportunity to learn), but it seems it might be hard to get your credit score back up if it’s damaged by this ridiculous situation. This might apply…

“If you have an account reported as in collections, your credit score may drop by a substantial amount. The degree to which a collection hurts your credit score is generally correlated with how high your credit score is when the collection agency reports the debt. The higher your score, the more points you can lose.”

Thank you for this information. Currently I have that one account in collections, but no late payments and my credit score is 803. I don’t plan on using credit either so I’m just leaving the account in collections and if it ever goes to count I will plead my case.

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Diane
on December 22, 2017 at 8:47 am

Lance, here’s a really useful, organized website that should answer all questions!

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